Medical Informatics has barely advanced in 50 years

Medical informaticians today are working on the same problems that they were working on in the early 1960s. I recently did a PubMed search on "computers AND medical records" and pulled the citations from the earliest dates captured by PubMed.

Here are some of the titles.

1965 Apr
AUTOMATING YOUR OWN MEDICAL DATA PROCESSING CAN BE COSTLY.

1965 Apr
AKRON SPEEDS INFORMATION SYSTEM SLOWLY.

1965 Apr
COMPUTER ALLOWS A ROUTINE ECG FOR EVERY ADMISSION.

1965 Mar 15
APPLICATION OF COMPUTERS IN CLINICAL PRACTICE.

1965 Mar
MECHANIZING A LARGE REGISTER OF FIRST ORDER PATIENT DATA.

1965 Feb
COMPUTER PROCESSING OF NEURORADIOLOGICAL REPORTS. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE APPLICATION OF THE VARIABLE-FIELD-LENGTH FORMAT AND MEDTRAN.

1965 Feb
[Storage and retrieval of medical records in 1964]

1964 Dec 21
COMPUTER HANDLING OF AMBULATORY CLINIC RECORDS.

1964 Nov
STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL OF CLINICAL AND LABORATORY DATA.

1964 Oct 16
AUTOMATION IN MEDICAL RECORDS: A LOOK AHEAD.

1964 Oct
COMPUTER GENERATED HOSPITAL DIAGNOSIS FILE.

1964 Jul 4
THE ROLE OF THE COMPUTER IN REFINING DIAGNOSIS.

1964 Jun 15
MANIPULATION OF AUTOPSY DIAGNOSES BY COMPUTER TECHNIQUE.

1964 Jun
REQUIREMENTS AND APPLICATIONS OF AUTOMATION IN HOSPITAL FUNCTIONS.

1964 Apr 9
[ELECTRONIC DATA PROCESSING IN CLINICAL ANESTHETIC PRACTICE.]

1964 Apr
DESIGN OF A COMPUTER SUPPORTED CLINICAL STUDY.

1963 Dec
OBSTETRICAL DATA PROCESSING: THE COMPUTER AS AN OBSTETRIC DATA RETRIEVAL DEVICE.

1963 Nov
A COMPUTER SYSTEM FOR CLASSIFYING CARDIOPULMONARY DISABILITY.

1963 Sep
A CENTRAL ELECTRONIC COMPUTER SPEEDS PATIENT INFORMATION.

1962 May
Patient data: a computer-based system.

In the 60s, our predecessors worked on the same problems that persist today: the electronic medical record; standardization of electronic information; using electronic information to catch errors in diagnosis, billing; analysis issues for electronic data.

It seems hard to believe. How could early informaticians have been so advanced with the primitive computers available in the 1960s? If we are still working on the same problems today that we were working on in 1960s, have we wasted the enormous research funding that was devoted to medical informatics projects through the past five decades? At the very least, these observations signify that present-day medical informaticians are less advanced than we may like to think.

- Jules Berman

key words: progress in medical informatics, hospital computerization, medical advancement, medical progress, hospital information systems, emr, ehr, electronic health record, electronic medical record, medical errors, medical data, hospital data, medical informaticists